Episode: 1168
Title: HPR1168: How I started my local Linux User Group
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1168/hpr1168.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 20:54:15

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Hey, this is Imenia.
Let me tell you a story today of how I started my local Linux user group.
So since this is the first recording that I'm doing for Hacker Public Radio, let me introduce
myself.
So my name is Imenia Klein.
I am a Frenchman living in Denver, I am a software engineer and I work for an American
company that does software for hospitals.
So Den Bosch is a city in the southern part of the Netherlands, it's actually the capital
city of the province Nord Brabant.
It's a rather small city, a little under 150,000 inhabitants.
So some of you might know what a lug is, some others might not.
So let me give a quick overview of what a Linux user group is.
A Linux user group is basically a social structure where people sharing the same interest
around Linux and open source get together and share IDs, participate in advocating for
the operating system, educate, so sometimes you have new users that come along and want
to know about this weird thing they've heard about and to provide support and also basically
socializing, meeting people that share the same interest.
So when I first moved to Den Bosch, I didn't know anybody in the city, came here for work
as I explained and especially I didn't know anybody that was interested in everything,
open source, free software, neighbor software as you might also want to call it.
I've tried a few times at work discussing with other colleagues, software developers
and people that do support technical people, but nobody really shared or showed an interest
for that kind of software.
So I didn't really know anybody in the city, didn't have any particular geeky friends
here, and I found myself in November of 2011 at home as my wife and kid were enjoying
vacation in another continent, as wife comes from Colombia and being a telecommuter,
she is able to go and work from her family's home.
So I was at home for about a month on my own and geeking away as you might imagine and
I thought, hey, or at least I had this idea for a few months and I said, okay, let's try
to do something and contact people and see if there is an interest locally to set up a
Linux user group.
I might add that I've worked for a few months in the US, in the city where my company is
based, Madison, Wisconsin, and there is a Madison Linux user, what's also called MadLog.
And I had attended a few of the meetings that they had, and I had really enjoyed that,
I was able to share and discuss with people that showed the same interest, so that gave
me the motivation to start something similar here and in the most.
I first tried looking around, googling, searching around for a combination of demos, secto
and boss, because that's the official name of the city, Linux, open source, that kind
of keywords, and it didn't really return anything helpful.
So I went on the Ubuntu NL forum, the official forum for the Ubuntu community in the Netherlands,
so I searched there, nothing really came back from that search.
And I actually found out that they have a pretty nice functionality.
It's a members map, when you open an account on that forum, you can decide to pinpoint
your location on the map, and so I zoomed on the city where I am, and if you take a radius
of about 10 kilometers around the city, I was able to locate 20 different profiles.
So I started up my spreadsheet application and started making a list of user names,
URL of their profile.
What was their real name is provided, and I wrote up a message, and with a system of token
I was able to replace the user name with the actual name of that user to try to make a personalized
email, and I started sending messages out through the private messaging functionality of
the forum, trying to reach out to the people that were at least that had indicated that
they were in the vicinity of the city.
And I think about 20-25 people I was able to contact, and I did get about 80% of the
people I contacted responded, and everybody except one had a positive response.
Negative response was a user that explained that he had pretty severe disabilities that
forced him to use specific input devices, and that unfortunately those were not supported
on Linux, and there was no driver for those, so that is on my ever-growing to-do list
of things to try to work around.
I contacted the company to try to see if they had interest, but it's a very small company
in the Netherlands, and they didn't show any interest for not even writing the drivers
for Linux, but just even releasing the specs.
So I might get to that in the future, who knows.
I now had this list of users, and I was browsing on the Ubuntu and L main list.
I found a list of hackerspaces in the Netherlands, and on that list of hackerspaces in the Netherlands,
there was an entry for thembos, which surprised me as I hadn't found about it.
There was a website that I was able to find dukes of hackers, it's the name of the group,
and there was a whole presentation about what is a hackerspace, and it might be a whole
other podcast if there isn't already a few on the hacker public radio, but I tried
to contact the persons on, there was basically a web front end to R.C., and I asked, hey guys,
are you active?
The response I got is, well, it depends on what you mean by active.
The gist of it is that there is R.C. channel, but there was no actual real space yet, it
was still in the discussion phase.
So I explained that I was trying to find people to start a Linux user group, and try to
see if there was similar interest in our group, and I did get one member of the Dumbos
hackerspace that told me that he might be interested, and we agreed to meet the next day
around the beer, and basically discuss a bit of our IDs.
That kind of summarizes the outreach that I've tried to do, looking on the internet, trying
to find people that had shown interest in Linux around the region and spreading a little
bit to the hackerspace scene, then came the second phase is in-person meetings with strangers
on the internet, so all seems very scary.
But yeah, that's a rule from the Dumbos hackerspace, and I decided to meet on the following
day around the beer, and share a few IDs, and to make a long story short, we said, okay,
you guys are working on the hackerspace, it's not really concrete yet, I'm coming from
a little different angle, specifically the Linux user group, so let's try to do the log
part, and maybe in the future expand and also include a hackerspace.
So yeah, this first meeting was very nice, I got to meet and discuss with who on a few
points, and when I came back, I wrote a post on the Ubuntu NL forum saying, hey, who would
like to meet up and try to find a location for our first meetings.
One member in particular, Vincent, we spotted that he would be interested, and so the next
day, who Vincent and I met at the same place, discussed again a little bit to get to know
Vincent, and then we went around the city, let's say the center, where there are a few bars,
etc., trying to find a place that could host, yeah, I think we were searching for about
10 people, we ended up visiting, I guess about 10 bars or so, and we ended with the list
of three potential places, so there was an Asian restaurant that had a very nice lounge,
then there was a regular bar that had kind of back room with a large table.
The third one that we ended up choosing as our location for the first meeting was a regular
bar as well, it had a very large table where we could easily fit about 15 people, and
so I got home that night, posted on the Ubuntu LL forum list, and I also sent a message
on different mailing lists, so I did that on the Debian NL mailing list, that's users,
I did that on the OpenSusy mailing list, on the Gen2 and CentOS mailing list, although
those seemed to be down, and no activity in the recent times, and I posted that in two
weeks we would be holding our first Linux user group in the most meeting, and then came
that date of the first meeting, so I remember that going to work that morning and getting
home pretty pumped up and ready to have this first meeting, and meeting all kind of new
and as to hope interesting people that share the same interests as you do, so I had served
the bar, discussed with the owner so that they could reserve the table, and I arrived
in time to just check the place out and order my first beer and greet people as they
were coming in, and yeah, a long people came, so I think in the end we were, I think about
eight people, and all kind of different backgrounds, we had a few students, we had people that were
already working for 15 plus years, and we had people that were in the, let's say, computer
industry and others that were in jobs that had nothing to do with computers, so very mixed
set of people, and I had tried, at least for the first meeting, to do stuff in an organized
way, so I had printed out a, say, empty spreadsheet with columns where I could fill people's names,
and what they were interested in, and a few details like, hey, if we are going to meet
again for next time, which day of the week would be best for you, so trying to get some
information about people, and what would be best for them for next meeting.
So yeah, this first meeting was really more on the social side, getting to know other
people, and trying to find their interest, and see if they would be motivated to have recurring
meetings around the Linux and open-source, and other things interesting to software hackers
and hardware hackers. So yeah, there was a positive experience, I would say, so I got home
that night, and wrote a few emails, posted on the window now, indicating that we would meet
again, also in two or weeks, to try to keep the momentum in there, and not wait too long,
and that made for an interesting first experience.
Along those, that time I also found out on the internet that there was another group, not
too far away, in a local town called Nulon, which must be about five to ten kilometers
from Dambos, that also has a computer user's group that focused on Linux, so we decided
to go with two other guys from that first meeting, to attend that session, and it was interesting,
but the demographics, it was all rather older people, in the 60, 60 plus year age, and their
interest was much more like as a user, how to use my computer and do all kinds of stuff.
The presentation we attended was how to record your vinyls from your vinyl this reader
to a file on your computer. But yeah, we decided that it was a little bit different, the
focus, we were interested in more technical stuff, so we decided to continue our separate
ways.
So yeah, that was the first meeting, and as I told, we met in the bar for the first two
meetings actually, and after that, one of the persons that I had contacted on the Ubuntu
and L forums explained that he was living in a squat, or a former squat, not too far away
from the center and from the train station, and that he would be able to provide us with
that place for free, and there was internet, wireless internet, and also a projector, so
we decided for the third meeting to go there and see what that X squat looked like, which
is actually an interesting experience. And actually, we stuck with that place, so every
meeting since then, except the one we just did in January, since it was the new year celebration,
we went back to the bar that hosted our first meeting, but all the other presentations
have taken place in that former squat, and we're very happy with that.
So that also brings me to an important part that I would like to share with you, especially
if you're interested in maybe setting up your own Linux user group. There are two documents
or links, websites that I have personally found to be very useful. One is called a
Recipe for Successful Linux User Group, and the other one is called the Linux User
Group How To. Both have been authored by Rick Moen, Rick Moen, as you would say in that.
And those contain very helpful tips on how to get started, and also how to maintain and
how to run your log in a successful way. And one of the, and if I just pick one out
there is to have a regular and recurring, both meeting place and date and time, so that
people don't get confused and can always find the same place, and also that it makes it easy
to remember. And the one that we've chosen is to meet every first Tuesday of the month at 8 p.m.
at the same place, the Knoflok, which is this former squat. And this makes it easy for everybody
to remember that we have done one exception to that is because the first Tuesday of the month
of January was the first, and we didn't feel that it would be a good thing to meet on the first
of January. A lot of people would probably not be able to attend, so we shifted it on the second
Tuesday of the week. But as soon as February we are back on schedule. A few other very helpful
tips to have the website that's always up to date and showing when is the next meeting, so that
users would always find information and they would see that your log is active, not that the
latest post was from eight months ago, and that kind of not sure if it's still running or if it's
dead. And that actually takes a little bit of dedication. I have solved this problem and definitely
not in the first month, but in the summer after we had started by basically preparing, so we have
a WordPress blog, and by pending a few posts, which is always the same text, and which I
release the day after we've had the previous meeting, and that just updating with the theme for
next month, and I have already the date and time and the place, and it's always the same that
is documented in there, so it gets faster as you get used to it. So yeah, go ahead and read on those
resources. Obviously, the links are in the show notes, and I found it very helpful for myself.
One thing that we've also attended as a group, four of us went last year in February to
fuzz them, which is the free and open source developer's European meeting in Brussels, which is
about a little under two hours driving here, one and a half hour, I would say, and one with three
guys who had never attended fuzz them, and that was interesting, due to having met those people
through the lab, we also were able to go there and learn a lot and having lots of nice experiences
and learning about new stuff. So yeah, that's about the beginning, and how I got people in touch
with each other, and how we had the first few meetings. One last thing that I would like to discuss
about is the different tools that we use. So obviously, we have set up a website, as I just
explained, basically a blog containing a post for every new meeting that we have planned. We also
have a wiki page, which at least in the beginning, we nodel all the different topics that we had,
and so the slides and presentation. I think we've done a not so good of a job in the last few
meetings to keep that up to date, but it serves as an archive. It will get updated in time.
We also have a mailing list that helps people get in touch. It's like our contact page that's
what is listed. We have an IRC channel, so I'm personally not a big IRC user, but a few members
of the blog are avid IRC communicators, so they are in the channel, which is a hash project 073
on a free note. And I've set up a Google plus page, which I post a few things trying to get the
word out there. And the last tool, which might be a little bit controversial, is Meetup, a site
that basically you can set up your group and publicize when you have events and the benefit is
that there is a lot of members on that. The reason why I set it up is the Madison Linux user group,
which I've talked briefly before. They also have a group on Meetup, and discussing with the
organizers there, it has helped them with their outreach and getting new members. So it is a
paid service, cost me about 30 euros per trimester, so about 120 euros. It is quite a substantial
amount, and I am still not fixed on how long I will keep that up in the air, but for now it is,
and a few new members have contacted us through that medium.
So yeah, this is a quick summary of how I set up the Linux user group here in the boss,
and I hope it has given you ideas and hopefully motivated a few of you to set up a group locally.
I've added a few links in the show notes that you can have a few examples. Some content is in
Dutch, some is in English, and as a final word of advice next to checking the two links that I've
talked about, if you are in the UK, go and see the website log.org.uk, which is basically a platform
where all the links user groups in the United Kingdom can have a hosting platform and mailing list
and stuff to get their log running or start it. So if you are in the UK, go and look that up,
and hopefully I have been able to spark some interest on your site. So yeah, I would say,
have fun, go outside, meet people, share and discuss things that you have interested,
and I find it personally a very satisfying experience. I've been able to meet a lot of new people
and made friends that I wouldn't have met if the log wasn't there. So yeah, if you decide to start
your log, get in touch with me, contact me via the HPR platform, and let me know what comes out of
there. Okay, well, see you.
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